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26 Dec 2013

NSA - 'one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds'

From the Washington Post. Edward Joseph Snowden emerged at the appointed hour, alone,
blending into a light crowd of locals and tourists. He cocked his arm
for a handshake, then turned his shoulder to indicate a path. Before
long he had guided his visitor to a secure space out of public view.
During more than 14 hours of interviews, the first he has
conducted in person since arriving here in June, Snowden did not part
the curtains or step outside. Russia granted him temporary asylum on
August 1, but Snowden remains a target of surpassing interest to the
intelligence services whose secrets he spilled on an epic scale.
Earlier this year, Snowden supplied three journalists, including
this one, with caches of top-secret documents from the National
Security Agency, where he worked as a contractor.
Dozens of revelations followed, and then hundreds, as news
organisations around the world picked up the story. Congress pressed
for explanations, new evidence revived old lawsuits and the Obama
administration was obliged to declassify thousands of pages it had
fought for years to conceal.
Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global
surveillance system that cast off many of its historic restraints
after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the
telephone, internet and location records of whole populations. One of
the leaked presentation slides described the agency's "collection
philosophy" as "Order one of everything off the menu."
Six months after the first revelations appeared in The
Washington Post and The Guardian, Snowden agreed to
reflect at length on the roots and repercussions of his choice. He
was relaxed and animated over two days of nearly unbroken
conversation, fueled by burgers, pasta, ice cream and Russian pastry.
Snowden offered vignettes from his intelligence career and from
his recent life as "an indoor cat" in Russia. But he
consistently steered the conversation back to surveillance, democracy
and the meaning of the documents he exposed.
"For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's
already accomplished," he said. "I already won. As soon as
the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying
to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn't want to change
society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should
change itself."
"All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in
how they are governed," he said. "That is a milestone we
left a long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch
goals."

Weighing the risks
Snowden is an orderly thinker, with an engineer's approach to
problem-solving. He had come to believe a dangerous machine of mass
surveillance was growing unchecked. Closed-door oversight in Congress
and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was a "graveyard
of judgment," he said, manipulated by the agency it was supposed
to supervise. Classification rules erected walls to prevent public
debate.
Toppling those walls would be a spectacular act of transgression
against the norms that prevailed inside them. Someone would have to
bypass security, extract the secrets, make undetected contact with
journalists and provide them with enough proof to tell the stories.
The NSA's business is "information dominance," the use
of other people's secrets to shape events. At 29, Snowden upended the
agency on its own turf.
"You recognise that you're going in blind, that there's no
model," Snowden said, acknowledging that he had no way to know
whether the public would share his views.
"But when you weigh that against the alternative, which is
not to act," he said, "you realise that some analysis is
better than no analysis. Because even if your analysis proves to be
wrong, the marketplace of ideas will bear that out. If you look at it
from an engineering perspective, an iterative perspective, it's clear
that you have to try something rather than do nothing."
By his own terms, Snowden succeeded beyond plausible ambition.
Accustomed to watching without being watched, the NSA faces scrutiny
it has not endured since the 1970s, or perhaps ever.
The cascading effects have made themselves felt in Congress, the
courts, popular culture, Silicon Valley and world capitals.
The basic structure of the internet itself is now in question, as
Brazil and members of the European Union consider measures to keep
their data away from US territory and US technology giants including
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo take extraordinary step to block the
collection of data by their government.
For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden's
motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by selective leaks
and misinterpretations.
On December 16, in a lawsuit that could not have gone forward
without the disclosures made possible by Snowden, US District Judge
Richard Leon described the NSA's capabilities as "almost
Orwellian" and said its bulk collection of US domestic telephone
records was probably unconstitutional.
The next day, in the White House, an unusual delegation of
executives from old telephone companies and young internet firms told
President Barack Obama that the NSA's intrusion into their networks
was a threat to the US information economy.
The following day, an advisory panel appointed by Obama
recommended substantial new restrictions on the NSA, including an end
to the domestic call-records program.
"This week is a turning point," said Jesselyn Radack of
the Government Accountability Project, who is one of Snowden's legal
advisers. "It has been just a cascade."
On June 22, the Justice Department unsealed a criminal complaint
charging Snowden with espionage and felony theft of government
property. It was a dry enumeration of statutes, without a trace of
the anger pulsing through Snowden's former precincts.Public enemy No. 1
In the intelligence and national security establishments, Snowden
is widely viewed as a reckless saboteur, and journalists abetting him
little less so.
At the Aspen Security Forum in July, a four-star military officer
known for his even keel seethed through one meeting alongside a
reporter he knew to be in contact with Snowden. Before walking away
he turned and pointed a finger.
"We didn't have another 9/11," he said angrily, because
intelligence enabled warfighters to find the enemy first. "Until
you've got to pull the trigger, until you've had to bury your people,
you don't have a clue."
It is commonly said of Snowden that he broke an oath of secrecy, a
turn of phrase that captures a sense of betrayal. NSA Director Keith
Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, among
many others, have used that formula.
In his interview with The Post, Snowden noted
matter-of-factly that Standard Form 312, the classified-information
non-disclosure agreement, is a civil contract. He signed it, but he
pledged his fealty elsewhere.
"The oath of allegiance is not an oath of secrecy," he
said. "That is an oath to the Constitution. That is the oath
that I kept that Keith Alexander and James Clapper did not."
People who accuse him of disloyalty, he said, mistake his purpose.
"I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to
improve the NSA," he said. "I am still working for the NSA
right now. They are the only ones who don't realise it."
Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their
mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes from
ordinary people - deliberately, in the case of bulk records
collection, and "incidentally," when the content of
American phone calls and emails are swept into NSA systems along with
foreign targets.
But Snowden also said he believed acceptance of the agency's
operations was not universal. He began to test that proposition more
than a year ago, he said, in periodic conversations with co-workers
and superiors that foreshadowed his emerging plan.
Beginning in October 2012, he said, he brought his misgivings to
two superiors in the NSA's Technology Directorate and two more in the
NSA Threat Operations Centre's regional base in Hawaii.
For each of them, and 15 other co-workers, Snowden said he opened
a data query tool called BOUNDLESSINFORMANT, which used colour-coded
"heat maps" to depict the volume of data ingested by NSA
taps.
His colleagues were often "astonished to learn we are
collecting more in the United States on Americans then we are on
Russians in Russia," he said. Many of them were troubled, he
said, and several said they did not want to know any more.
"I asked these people, 'What do you think the public would do
if this was on the front page?' " he said. He noted that critics
have accused him of bypassing internal channels of dissent. "How
is that not reporting it? How is that not raising it?" he said.
By last December, Snowden was contacting reporters, although he
had not yet passed along any classified information. He continued to
give his colleagues the "front-page test," he said, until
April.
Asked about those conversations, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines sent
a prepared statement to The Post: "After extensive
investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors
and co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr
Snowden's contention that he brought these matters to anyone's
attention."
Just before releasing the documents this spring, Snowden made a
final review of the risks. He had overcome what he described at the
time as a "selfish fear" of the consequences for himself.
"I said to you the only fear [left] is apathy - that people
won't care, that they won't want change," he recalled this
month.
The documents leaked by Snowden compelled attention because they
revealed to Americans a history they did not know they had.
Internal briefing documents reveled in the "Golden Age of
Electronic Surveillance." Brawny cover names such as MUSCULAR,
TUMULT and TURMOIL boasted of the agency's prowess.
With assistance from private communications firms, the NSA had
learned to capture enormous flows of data at the speed of light from
fibre-optic cables that carried internet and telephone traffic over
continents and under seas.
According to one document in Snowden's cache, the agency's Special
Source Operations group, which as early as 2006 was said to be
ingesting "one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds," had
an official seal that might have been parody: an eagle with all the
world's cables in its grasp.
Each year, NSA systems collected hundreds of millions of email
address books, hundreds of billions of mobile phone location records
and trillions of domestic call logs.
Most of that data, by definition and intent, belonged to ordinary
people suspected of nothing. But vast new storage capacity and
processing tools enabled the NSA to use the information to map human
relationships on a planetary scale. Only this way, its leadership
believed, could the NSA reach beyond its universe of known
intelligence targets.
In the view of the NSA, signals intelligence, or electronic
eavesdropping, was a matter of life and death, "without which
America would cease to exist as we know it," according to an
internal presentation in the first week of October 2001 as the agency
ramped up its response to the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and
Washington.
With stakes such as those, there was no capability the NSA
believed it should leave on the table. The agency followed orders
from President George W. Bush to begin domestic collection without
authority from Congress and the courts.Widening the net
When the NSA won those authorities later, some of them under
secret interpretations of laws passed by Congress between 2007 and
2012, the Obama administration went further still.
Using PRISM, the cover name for collection of user data from
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and five other US-based companies,
the NSA could obtain all communications to, from or "about"
any specified target. The companies had no choice but to comply with
the government's request for data.
But the NSA could not use PRISM, which was overseen once a year by
the surveillance court, for the collection of virtually all data
handled by those companies.
To widen its access, it teamed up with its British counterpart,
Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, to break into the
private fibre-optic links that connected Google and Yahoo data
centres around the world.
That operation, which used the cover name MUSCULAR, tapped into US
company data from outside US territory.
The NSA therefore believed it did not need permission from
Congress or judicial oversight. Data from hundreds of millions of US
accounts flowed over those Google and Yahoo links, but classified
rules allowed the NSA to presume that data ingested overseas belonged
to foreigners.
Disclosure of the MUSCULAR project enraged and galvanised US
technology executives. They believed the NSA had lawful access to
their front doors - and had broken down the back doors anyway.
Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith took to his company's blog
and called the NSA an "advanced persistent threat" - the
worst of all fighting words in US cybersecurity circles, generally
reserved for Chinese state-sponsored hackers and sophisticated
criminal enterprises.
"For the industry as a whole, it caused everyone to ask
whether we knew as much as we thought," Smith recalled in an
interview. "It underscored the fact that while people were
confident that the US government was complying with US laws for
activity within US territory, perhaps there were things going on
outside the United States . . . that made this bigger and more
complicated and more disconcerting than we knew."
They wondered, he said, if the NSA was "collecting
proprietary information from the companies themselves."
Led by Google and then Yahoo, one company after another announced
expensive plans to encrypt its data traffic over tens of thousands of
miles of cable. It was a direct - in some cases, explicit - blow to
NSA collection of user data in bulk. If the NSA wanted the
information, it would have to request it or circumvent the encryption
one target at a time.Making life harder for the NSA
As these projects are completed, the internet will become a less
friendly place for the NSA to work. The agency can still collect data
from virtually any one, but collecting from everyone will be harder.
The industry's response, Smith acknowledged, was driven by a
business threat. U.S. companies could not afford to be seen as candy
stores for U.S. intelligence. But the principle of the thing, Smith
said, "is fundamentally about ensuring that customer data is
turned over to governments pursuant to valid legal orders and in
accordance with constitutional principles."
Snowden has focused on much the same point from the beginning:
Individual targeting would cure most of what he believes is wrong
with the NSA.
Six months ago, a reporter asked him by encrypted email why
Americans would want the NSA to give up bulk collection if that would
limit a useful intelligence tool.
"I believe the cost of frank public debate about the powers
of our government is less than the danger posed by allowing these
powers to continue growing in secret," he replied, calling them
"a direct threat to democratic governance."
In the Moscow interview, Snowden said, "What the government
wants is something they never had before," adding: "They
want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be
allowing?"
Snowden likened the NSA's powers to those used by British
authorities in Colonial America, when "general warrants"
allowed anyone to be searched. The FISA court, Snowden said, "is
authorising general warrants for the entire country's metadata."
"The last time that happened, we fought a war over it,"
he said.
Technology, of course, has enabled a great deal of consumer
surveillance by private companies, as well. The difference with the
NSA's possession of the data, Snowden said, is that government has
the power to take away life or freedom.
At the NSA, he said, "there are people in the office who joke
about, 'We put warheads on foreheads.' Twitter doesn't put warheads
on foreheads."
Privacy, as Snowden sees it, is a universal right, applicable to
American and foreign surveillance alike.
"I don't care whether you're the pope or Osama bin Laden,"
he said. "As long as there's an individualised, articulable,
probable cause for targeting these people as legitimate foreign
intelligence, that's fine. I don't think it's imposing a ridiculous
burden by asking for probable cause. Because, you have to understand,
when you have access to the tools the NSA does, probable cause falls
out of trees."
When it comes to spying on allies, by Snowden's lights, the news
is not always about the target.
"It's the deception of the government that's revealed,"
Snowden said, noting that the Obama administration offered false
public assurances following the initial reports about NSA
surveillance in Germany "The US government said: 'We follow
German laws in Germany. We never target German citizens.' And then
the story comes out and it's: 'What are you talking about? You're
spying on the chancellor.' You just lied to the entire country, in
front of Congress."
In private, US intelligence officials still maintain that spying
among friends is routine for all concerned, but they are giving
greater weight to the risk of getting caught.
US officials say it is obvious that Snowden's disclosures will do
grave harm to intelligence gathering, exposing methods that
adversaries will learn to avoid.
"We're seeing al-Qaeda and related groups start to look for
ways to adjust how they communicate," said Matthew Olsen,
director of the National Counterterrorism Centre and a former general
counsel at the NSA.
Other officials, who declined to speak on the record about
particulars, said they had watched some of their surveillance
targets, in effect, changing channels. That evidence can be read
another way, they acknowledged, given that the NSA managed to monitor
the shift.The missing files
According to senior intelligence officials, two uncertainties feed
their greatest concerns. One is whether Russia or China managed to
take the Snowden archive from his computer, a worst-case assumption
for which three officials acknowledged there is no evidence.
In a previous assignment, Snowden taught US intelligence personnel
how to operate securely in a "high-threat digital environment,"
using a training scenario in which China was the designated threat.
He declined to discuss the whereabouts the files now, but he said he
is confident he did not expose them to Chinese intelligence in Hong
Kong and did not bring them to Russia at all.
"There's nothing on it," he said, turning his laptop
screen toward his visitor. "My hard drive is completely blank."
The other big question is how many documents Snowden took. The
NSA's incoming deputy director, Rick Ledgett, said on CBS's 60
Minutes recently that the number may approach 1.7 million, a huge
and unexplained spike over previous estimates. Ledgett said he would
favour trying to negotiate an amnesty with Snowden in exchange for
"assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured."
Obama's national security adviser, Susan Rice, later dismissed the
possibility.
"The government knows where to find us if they want to have a
productive conversation about resolutions that don't involve Edward
Snowden behind bars," said Ben Wizner of the American Civil
Liberties Union, the central figure on Snowden's legal team.
Some news accounts have quoted US government officials as saying
Snowden has arranged for the automated release of sensitive documents
if he is arrested or harmed. There are strong reasons to doubt that,
beginning with Snowden's insistence, to this reporter and others,
that he does not want the documents published in bulk.
If Snowden were fool enough to rig a "dead man's switch",
confidants said, he would be inviting anyone who wants the documents
to kill him.
Asked about such a mechanism in the Moscow interview, Snowden made
a face and declined to reply. Later, he sent an encrypted message.
"That sounds more like a suicide switch," he wrote. "It
wouldn't make sense."
Former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden predicted that Snowden
will waste away in Moscow as an alcoholic, like other "defectors."
To this, Snowden shrugged. He does not drink at all. Never has.
But Snowden knows his presence here is easy ammunition for
critics. He did not choose refuge in Moscow as a final destination.
He said that once the US government voided his passport as he tried
to change planes en route to Latin America, he had no other choice.
It would be odd if Russian authorities did not keep an eye on him,
but no retinue accompanied Snowden and his visitor saw no one else
nearby.
Snowden neither tried to communicate furtively nor asked that a
visitor do so. He has had continuous internet access and talked to
his lawyers and journalists daily, from his first day in the transit
lounge at Sheremetyevo airport.
"There is no evidence at all for the claim that I have
loyalties to Russia or China or any country other than the United
States," he said. "I have no relationship with the Russian
government. I have not entered into any agreements with them."
"If I defected at all," Snowden said, "I defected
from the government to the public."

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